Called to New York COVID-19 Hotspot SFU Alumnus spends early days of outbreak volunteering in a hard-hit Bronx neighborhood STORY BY / Eric Horell ’13, ’17, Director of Alumni Engagement
When his wife Joanna asked him what concerned him the most about going to New York City to work on the frontlines of the novel coronavirus outbreak, alumnus Bill Martyak worried about catching the virus himself, or his family contracting it while he was away, but there was a more immediate concern on his mind.
COVID-19 Testing: For 21 days Bill Martyak volunteered at a testing center in a hard-hit Bronx community.
“Parking,” he says. “While packing the car I was thinking about where in the world I was going to park in the city.” That problem never materialized. Bill drove straight into Manhattan without issue and parked his car on 7th Avenue, right outside the hotel he would call home for four weeks. The normally bustling New York City was now a ghost town. “The first few days I had to do all this training with New York City Health and Hospitals,” recalls Bill, “and then I had a free night, so I walked to Times Square. Everything was lit up like it always is, but it was just me and maybe a dozen police officers. I’d go to Central Park on Sundays, my off day, and I’d go for a jog and not see a single person. That was pretty surreal. Those moments put what was happening in perspective.” A 2000 physician assistant graduate, Bill was in New York City via a temporary staffing agency tasked with gathering as many medical professionals as possible to serve as reinforcements for the city’s overwhelmed hospitals and their depleted staff at the onset of the pandemic. At first it was something Bill never considered. “I didn’t know it was available,” he says. At the start of the outbreak Bill went from seeing over twenty patients per day to only two to four at the New Paris Rural Health Clinic where he worked as the state rolled out stay-at-home restrictions. Even with a smaller patient load, he was aware that he could become exposed. Because testing was limited, and there was a four to five day turnaround for results; he was living in the basement of his home to avoid potentially exposing his family to the virus. Then he Saint Francis University
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